Privacy

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Why Signal over Jabber/XMPP? (piefed.world)

submitted 1 day ago by TurkeyDurkey@piefed.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Over the past few years I have gone through a bunch of different apps and protocols to find the best one for "securely" communicating with my family and friends.

I ended up with the amazing XMPP protocol and my family/friends frequently use its clients to contact me.

Monal for IOS and Cheogram/Conversations/Quicksy for Android. The android app I install depends on if I can get F-Droid on their phone or not.

It's been great with OMEMO encryption and the clients/apps available for XMPP. But sometimes I have issues introducing people to it.

Jabber (friendly name for xmpp) sounds silly to say. The clients all have weird names. And after trying the Signal mobile app it feels more focused than what anyone in the XMPP community has whipped up.

But the capabilities of XMPP makes it better.

Signal Cons (immediete)

Centralized
Single app
Phone numbers

XMPP/Jabber Cons

Picking server
Apps are sort of less friendly

What really scares me about Signal is the centralization. Any nerd can easily host an XMPP server these days. But Signal from what I've heard really wants us to use their server.

If XMPP gets more attention I'm sure we can get people supporting projects and creating better apps.

I keep seeing people recommended Signal instead.

This is a bit of a tired ramble. What I wanna know is why anyone is preferring Signal over XMPP apps. I assume it might be not knowing about it. Tell me what you use to message people.

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[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'll be honest, most of the crypto/security jargon flies straight over my head, but Tim Henkes' reply at the end, for fucks' sake man. I don't suppose xmpp has an alternative encryption to use instead of omemo?

[–] TurkeyDurkey@piefed.world 3 points 1 day ago

Pretty much any encryption you can send over text. My favorite clients support PGP instead. But it's up to the clients to implement envryption and not really the protocol I guess.